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26/01/2015

Like the simplest
acts of theatre, The
Unspoken Word is ‘Joe’ unfolds upon the very stage in front of us, in
something akin to real time. There is no hiding, no wings, no real fourth wall
to hide behind; just five people on stage. Initially taking the form of a
staged-reading of a new script, ‘Joe’
soon descends into an extended meta-theatrical exercise which will have you
questioning the veracity of what you are witnessing. Is it really what it
seems?

Written by Zoey
Dawson and presented by Melbourne’s MKA:
Theatre of New Writing and Griffin
Independent, ‘Joe’ is directed by
Declan
Greene with his trademark verve and a glorious anarchic sense of self-satire.
Not so much in his own work as a director and playwright, but within the
theatrical landscape as a wider field. After an extended opening address by the
director of the staged reading, the reading-proper begins and although it is
funny, awkward and satirical, the lines between reality and artifice are
irrevocably blurred, and – bravely – even the ending doesn’t provide answers.

25/01/2015

Written in 1988, After Dinner is Andrew Bovell’s first
play. Set in a suburban pub bistro, five single thirty-somethings meet after
work for Friday night drinks and a meal, and their very individual
personalities and circumstances collide in an achingly brutal riot of sex,
misdirections, and variations on the idea of friendship.

Best known for his
plays such as When The Rain Stops Falling,
Speaking in Tongues
(later filmed as Lantana), Holy Day, and the
recent adaptation of Kate Grenville’s The
Secret River, Bovell is increasingly drawn to the turbulence and tumult
of daily lives, the dark and gripping mysteries which lie concealed beneath a
veneer of normalcy in each of our lives. Written when he was just twenty-one, After
Dinner lacks his trademark finesse and subtlety; everything here is
dialled up larger than it should be, all seems to be turned well past
naturalism into a kind of crude grotesquerie. Presented here by the Sydney Theatre Company, it is
one-hundred minutes of painfully coarse and blunt banter between the five
lonely hearts, as their Friday night quickly deteriorates into a night none of
them would want to remember in a hurry.

Staged in the Seymour
Centre’s wide York Theatre, Sydney
Festival’s The Kitchen –
directed by Roysten Abel – is full of noise and light, but as a piece of
theatre, it is strangely lacking.

The stage is
dominated by a large golden tiered frame, seating twelve musicians, drummers,
each playing the mizhav, one of the world’s oldest percussion instruments. The
frame, like the drum itself, is shaped like a large pot-shaped vessel, and it
resounds with the sharp metallic beat of the drums, pounding and resounding with
intricate and furious rhythms. In front of the frame sit two cooks, each
preparing a giant pot of payasam (a type of kheer), which is later served in
the foyer following the performance.

23/01/2015

It begins like a
fairytale – two people meet, there’s the heady giddy exhilaration of falling in
love; there’s joy, heartbreak, sadness; a tiny glimmer of something else. Except
there’s a twist: the two people – figures – are not human, but rather two
dexterous hands. In Jaco Van
Dormael and Michèle
Anne De Mey’s Kiss & Cry, playing at
Carriageworks for the last days of the Sydney Festival, a romance is
played out on a miniature scale whilst simultaneously being filmed and screened
above the action itself.

21/01/2015

Twelve years ago I
saw James Thierrée’s Junebug Symphony
at the Sydney Festival and
fell in love with his unique – and often surreal – mixture of movement, dance,
clowning, bodily contortions, and elaborate set pieces and stage machinery.
While I don’t remember much of the show today, I remember two huge
shadow-puppet beasts emerging from the wings of the stage, two performers at their
heads, engaged in a dreamlike ballet or battle. I saw his Au Revoir Parapluie in 2008, and so the promise of another show as
the centrepiece of this year’s festival was hard to resist. Unfortunately
though, in Tabac Rouge we
have not just another James Thierrée show, but rather The James Thierrée Show.

20/01/2015

Mother
Courage and Her Children is perhaps Brecht’s most well-known play,
written immediately prior to the Second World War in 1939, and first performed
in 1941. Set in the seventeeth century, it is the story of ‘Mother Courage’ as
she follows the Swedish Army during the Thirty Year War, eking out a living
selling food and provisions to the soldiers. Like Brecht’s story, the Korean pansori also originated in the
seventeenth century as an oral tradition of storytelling. Now a rigorous
artform, pansori involves a singer and a drum, and combines a strong emotional
stories with the
ethereal vocal gymnastics of highly dedicated and highly trained singers. Currently playing
as part of the Sydney Festival
is UKCHUK-GA:
Pansori Mother Courage, directed by In Woo Nam and written, composed and
performed by Jaram Lee.

19/01/2015

While Perth-based theatre
collective The Last Great Hunt are a relatively new ensemble, their reputation
and work is not. As the creators of previous Sydney Festival
shows such as The Adventures of Alvin
Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer (2011) and It’s Dark Outside (2013), they have forged a name for themselves as
makers of highly theatrical means using little more than a blank stage, clever masking
and projections, and the audience’s imagination. So it is with their most
recent offering, Falling
Through Clouds, presented at the Seymour
Centre as part of this year’s About An Hour
program.

In a
technologically-saturated age, when most art forms are moving towards modes of
digital creation, distribution or enhancement, theatre is perhaps the only art
form whose existence cannot be adequately captured or recreated in a virtual
space. True, theatre is being filmed and broadcast in cinemas across the world
and being made available online, both in Australia and overseas, but it
doesn’t capture the same experience as being in a darkened space with a hundred
other people, watching performers in a space in front of you. Perhaps the
future of digital theatre lies not in accurately capturing the performance in a
recording, but in something else, in the creation of a world in which the
performance can sit.

Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company, in
collaboration with Google’s Creative Labs (henceforth referred to as ‘Google’),
has instigated a digital theatre project which is attempting to test the
boundaries of overlap between traditional theatre practices and the endless
possibilities of digital technology. In short, their goal is to create a
prototype in which the theatrical performance is just one element of a wider
world, of a wider conversation about the performance, one which takes place on
social media platforms, and actively encourages audience participation and
interaction.

11/01/2015

If you’ve read the
little print at the back of a program for a Griffin Theatre Company production
over the past five years, you might have noticed a play called Masquerade as being in development. In
2015, co-produced Griffin and
the State
Theatre Company of South Australia as part of the Sydney Festival, Kate Mulvany’s Masquerade
completes its journey to the stage in a production bursting with life, colour,
music and dance. But for all its joyous raucous rambunctiousness, there is a
bittersweet and touching story which makes this story, this production, more
raw and affecting than it might otherwise have been as a relatively ‘straight’
adaptation.

08/01/2015

Written in 1993, Radiance began its
life on Belvoir’s corner stage, and after
being produced around the country and internationally, and made into a film,
this play about coming home comes home itself, just on twenty-one years later,
to the place where it all began. Written by Louis Nowra, it is the story of
three sisters – united by the death of their mother – as they gather together
for her funeral after many years apart. Like so many theatrical stories of
families, it isn’t long before the familial ghosts come out of the past and
their reunion opens old wounds.

01/01/2015

In Sydney’s theatres this year, there are many shows to look forwards to – Masquerade, MinusOneSister,
and 2014 Griffin Award winner The
Bleeding Tree at Griffin; Beckett, Chekhov, Dorfman, Woolf, Shakespeare,
Shaw, and new plays from Melissa Bubnic and Kylie
Coolwellat Sydney
Theatre Company; Radiance, Mother Courage, Samson, Mortido and Ivanov at Belvoir; and a year of staples – Hamlet, The Tempest, As You Like It
– from Bell
Shakespeare. There’s Sport for Jove’s Edward II; The ANZAC Project at the Ensemble
theatre; James Thierrée’s Tabac Rouge,
Falling
Through Clouds, Kiss and Cry, and The Kitchen at the Sydney Festival, as well as the David
Byrne/Fatboy Slim musical Here Lies Love for Vivid, Rocky
Horror Show’s long awaited return, the Australian premiere of Matilda
the musical, and several shows interstate.